The Bias
Is It Too Late Now To Say Sorry?
TRANSCRIPT
Is It Too Late Now To Say Sorry?
By: Arno Pedram and Isoke Samuel
Transcript Key:
Speakers (in order of appearance):
In this transcript, Speakers’ words will all appear in size 12 black type. Speaker names are in bold size 13 black type.
Isoke Samuel: a host. The first host to speak. Her narration continues throughout the script
Arno Pedram: a host. The second host to speak. Their narration continues throughout the script.
Donna Minkowitz: a central character. She is the journalist responsible for the article discussed in the podcast
Riki Wilchins: a central character and activist for trans rights and one of the people who challenged Donna on the content of her article.
Daphne Gugat: one of Brandon’s ex girlfriends who speaks about him in an archival Dyke TV clip.
Leslie Feinberg: a prominent activist and author who also spoke out against Donna. The clip is from an interview she did with Dyke TV.
News montage: a series of archival news clips reporting on Brandon Teena’s murder and the movie Boys Don’t Cry.
Ambient Sound and music: Ambient sound and music will appear in brackets. Descriptions of ambient sound will be centered.
End of Transcript Key.
——————————————————-INTRO—————————————————————
CONTENT WARNING:
Heads up fellow listeners, this episode will have discussions of rape, transphobia, racism and violence.
[NEWS MONTAGE]
NEBRASKA TV CHANNEL 7:
A relative discovered the murder victims Friday on this farmstead south of Humboldt. The victims were Tina Brandon of Lincoln Philip divine of Fairfield, Iowa, and Lisa Lambert of Humboldt. The official briefing did not explain what could have sparked the slayings or what the other two victims were doing at Lisa Lambert’s house but the county attorney did reveal one strange detail. Tina Brandon posed as a man named Brandon.
ABC 20/20 Downtown 2000:
Tonight I’m going to introduce you to someone who was different in the most fundamental way: a woman who felt she was a man. In fact she lived as one convincingly. Our lead story is about how this particular kind of difference when it gets out in a small town can be a matter of life or death. You are not a boy that is what went wrong. You are not a boy. Brandon Teena’s complicated life inspired the Golden Globe winning film Boys Don’t Cry…
PBS Charlie Rose (1999):
A film is already generating a great deal of buzz. Boys Don’t Cry follows a true story of 21 year old Teena Brandon, who wanted to live life as a boy but found a tragic end. Here is the film’s trailer. A true story of hope, fear, “are you are you not ?” and the courage it takes to be yourself. Nothing can go wrong if we’re together. We can still do it. Boys Don’t cry.
ARNO:
On New Year’s Eve 1993, in a farmhouse near Falls City Nebraska, two men killed Brandon Teena, a twenty-one year old trans man. His killing made news across the country, and was even turned into the award winning movie Boys Don’t Cry starring Hilary Swank. It was one of the first times trans identity was talked about so widely. But the coverage was mostly transphobic, misgendering him and identifying him as a closeted lesbian, or a woman dressing as a man to quote “live her dreams.”
[The Bias theme song starts. It’s a mix of “the bias” “the bias” “the bias” quotes, kind of DJ style with some kind of electric guitar, beats, voice distortion.]
ISOKE:
This is the Bias, where we talk what happens to a story before it prints out. We’re your hosts Isoke Samuel [and Arno Pedram!] In this episode, we’ll talk about one of the transphobic articles written about Brandon. The article was special because people at the time protested its publication. It was also the piece that inspired the movie Boys Don’t Cry. The author of this article now regrets the transphobia of her piece. So we’ll try to understand what led her to write in the way she did, and what accountability looks like for journalists who fuck up.
[PAUSE]
ISOKE:
I came to this story never having heard about Brandon’s killing. It happened before I was born and it wasn’t a news story that anyone ever told me about. But I did know about the movie Boys Don’t Cry. It has kind of a cult following and a lot of people close to me recommended I watch it. The thing is I always get a little too emotionally invested in books and movies so as a general rule of thumb I try to steer clear of ones that feature violence against characters I know I’m going to end up caring about. It just hits me a little too hard. Because of that I didn’t watch the film until we decided to do this episode. But Arno, I know you have a different experience. This story is a little personal for you. Do you want to tell us why?
ARNO:
Yea, so I monitor and work on the media’s coverage of trans issues on a regular basis. I’ve held workshops and sessions for journalism students and faculty to learn how to cover these issues better. And when I looked into this story, it had a lot of what I talk about in those workshops. The fascination for trans people, the misgendering, the amateurish psycho-sexual diagnostics, etc. I wasn’t born when Brandon was killed, and I’m not from North America. But when I asked my trans friends, this is a story that they all knew. For many, it was the first time they saw a trans person on screen. And you can imagine how hard it is to see this rare story end up in rape and murder. So when I was told that the author of one of the key articles of the time had come to regret her coverage, I thought it’d be worth digging into. That’s how we met Donna.
———————————————-ACT 1———————————————–
[sound of setting up an interview
ARNO: Let me give you a quick review of what we’re going to do today
DONNA: uh-hu (agreement)]
ARNO:
In 1987, Donna Minkowitz started working for the Village Voice. Donna was part of the lesbian community and interested in unconventional, personal writing. In pictures of the time, she wore thin-framed silver glasses and short, brown hair and boyish clothes. Donna was, and still is, a butch woman.
DONNA:
The Village Voice was especially really pro queer, which was really unusual in the 70s, when I was growing up[…]. It was very pro sex, and I was coming out you know, I was about 15 and 16. And anyway, it’s totally exciting to read it.
ARNO:
In our conversation with her, she told us she became the go-to reporter assigned to cover gay and lesbian politics. So when her editor heard about Brandon Teena, naturally, he sent Donna to report on the story.
DONNA:
how Richard and how I immediately saw the story was like, wow, look at this, um, a lesbian has, she was able to live as a man and have girlfriends who, who accepted her as a man. And she was able to do this and get away with this. And then then these people killed her. So that was, that was the narrative I saw.
ARNO:
But that wasn’t who Brandon was. Brandon lived as a man and was known to his girlfriends as a man. In a Dyke TV piece a year after his death, in 1994, one of Brandon’s exes had no doubts about his gender.
DAPHNE GUGAT DYKE TV:
Brandon was a woman’s man. I mean, every woman’s dream. every woman’s dream If I’m — Brandon really was a man. Oh, Jesus! he would have women after him all the time. I mean, he knew how to please you. He knew how to do everything right. And it was just like, UHhhh!
ISOKE:
Brandon was very popular with straight girls. And that was picked up by a lot of media. In reports about him in the Associated Press, Playboy, and Donna’s article in the Village Voice, Brandon was framed as a poser, a gender deceiver, a lesbian masquerading as a man to get girls. When Donna talked with people he knew, part of her identified with Brandon. And that fit in with her habit of making her stories really personal.
DONNA:
You know, Brandon was much better than their other boyfriends. He was more romantic. He wrote them poems. And you know, he wore Cologne and gave them teddy bears. And he was so much nicer and he didn’t. He didn’t pressure them for sex and and just all this stuff, you know it was, it felt so good to hear about him and, and identify with him. I mean some of my undoing with the story was not realizing that Brandon really could have a different narrative than, than me.
ISOKE:
Donna spent a few days in Falls City, where Brandon lived before he was killed. And there, she met Lana Tisdel, Brandon’s last girlfriend. She spent time with Lana and her family and she started to get a sense of what led to this triple murder.
[karaoke music of Lana Tisdel and others singing in Falls City Nebraska From the DykeTV Brandon Profile]
DONNA:
Lana was sort of a karaoke star there. She’s very pretty. She was supposed to be one of the prettiest girls in town. [karaoke music rises and falls] Everyone looked down on her family. Her family was on welfare.
ISOKE:
Donna also says that Falls city looked down on Lana’s family because they hung out with Black people. Though this seemed like a small fact it might actually have played a larger role in what happened on the night of Brandon’s murder. The stories of the time and Boys Don’t Cry itself focused on Brandon. But two other people were killed that night. One of them was Lisa Lambert, a friend of Brandon who’d also had a relationship with him. And the third victim was Philip DeVine, a Black man who was dating Lana’s sister. In her article of the time, Donna identified Devine as a young Black man, and added that no other outlet mentioned his race. And indeed, none of the written or TV news reports we found from the time mentioned Devine’s race. But the fact that he was Black…
DONNA:
That’s probably not incidental.
I did not know this at the time I wrote my story that I have found out since that I’m missing Nissen was very overtly racist, probably still is, and had the launch of white supremacist organization. […] I think in some ways, it was ancillary that they were two other people at the spouse, um, at the same time, um, at the same time, I mean, it’s not ancillary that Philip was a Black man, and at least one of them, hated Black people, and didn’t think it was a big deal to kill him. I think race, race was an under, under-analyzed part of the killing, and part of this.
ARNO:
So Donna filed her story, she says she didn’t think there’d be anything controversial about her piece.
DONNA:
I had no fear whatsoever. And I was completely shocked when I was walking to work and the boys and I saw posters. And they said something like, you know, Village Voice is murdering transsexuals, or village voices killing transsexuals. And they may have even had my name, they may have said Donna Minkowitz is killing transsexuals. So I was like, what! My story was in support of Brandon!
[protest sounds, whistling, “[unintelligible speech] TRANSSEXUAL RIGHTS!”]
LESLIE FEINBERG:
This article is a psychosexual salacious view. It identifies, it says clearly the Brandon Teena did not identify as a woman and a lesbian and yet it insists on referring to her as she and a lesbian, dwells on the sexual aspects, and even implies that having been raped as a child shaped this identity.
———————————————-ACT 2———————————————–
ARNO:
Leslie Feinberg was the voice you just heard. Feinberg was a prominent trans and butch lesbian writer and activist. Her most famous work is Stone Butch Blues, and if you haven’t read it, you absolutely should! Leslie was captured in a Dyke TV piece of the time, commenting on the protest in front of the Village Voice. Feinberg is referring to parts of Donna’s piece that were particularly intrusive in the life of Brandon. For example, part of Donna’s article read “Her bereaved girlfriends are a leery of describing sexual details, but it’s glaringly clear Brandon was the precise opposite of a “do me” feminist. “He wouldn’t let anyone touch him here, here, here,” Lana says, pointing to her breasts, crotch, and thighs. Other lovers report, with varying degrees of explicitness, that Brandon never got touched by them. She was the only one who touched, stroked, stimulated, or shtupped. You could call Brandon a top, but I’m not sure that word fully captures her enormous desire to give other people pleasure.” Another person protesting that day was Riki Wilchins.
RIKI:
I’m Ricky Wilchins and I’ve written a number of books on gender theory and politics and was also very active in trans activism in the 1990s.
ARNO:
Riki was 6 feet tall with a short brown pixie cut, round glasses. That day, she wore a black t shirt with the words transexual menace written across the front. She had printed those t shirts just for the occasion. Trans people in the community were already angry because of a piece in playboy magazine about Brandon. The piece was titled “gender deceiver,” it was gruesome in descriptions of the killing, and it seemed to almost blame Brandon for his murder. And that was a little surprising because at the time Playboy was known to be more progressive on LGBT issues. So when Riki heard that the Village Voice, a gay and lesbian friendly newspaper, was also butchering the story… She decided to take action.
[Exciting/tense music. Tension is building up, but it is hopeful/positive.]
RIKI:
There we’re probably I don’t know, 14 or 16 of us all in black transexual menace t shirts right outside the office of The Voice, just flyering like crazy. And it was very freeing. And it was very exciting. And none of us had ever done anything like that […] we had purposely made sure to print up a whole bunch of the black transexual menace t shirt, with red dripping Rocky Horror lettering on the front, very tongue in cheek, but to make sure that we were visible and we printed up flyers beforehand, and basically said, we’re going to block off the building and anyone who goes in or out of this block, gets a flyer…
RIKI:
The Village Voice piece ran and took a really salacious tone around thinking of Brandon as the ultimate hot Butch and people were really ticked off.
DONNA:
I went downstairs and the funny thing is, I started talking to the people in a friendly way. They did not know I was Donna Minkowitz, the author of the article. I, I just came with my reporter’s pad. […] I admit part of me felt like, Whoa, they’re demonstrating against me. Wow, what a big deal.
RIKI:
A lot of people stopped and watched and then all of a sudden.. It scared the heck out of us…three squad cars pulled up and cops started pouring out. And we just stood there. And I went over to the first one really quietly and said, “What’s up?” And, you know, “we’ve heard that and, you know, potentially violent protest”. And I just said, Look, you know, we’re, we’re a bunch of transsexuals. We’re out here exercising our first amendment rights, because we didn’t like an article.
ISOKE:
The cops were amused, they stuck around, smiling.
RIKI:
After about an hour or so we had basically wallpapered everyone who’d come in around the block, and declare victory and went home.
ISOKE:
Riki and other protestors continued to confront Donna. Once, Riki says she went to one of Donna’s speaking events to confront her on the flaws of the article. But eventually Riki and Donna moved on.
[SCORE ENDS]
RIKI:
It wasn’t like we got an apology but it wasn’t like she was writing, you know one piece after another. At a certain point you know, you you made your argument and you made your points.
ISOKE:
Riki went deeper into Trans activism, even organizing a vigil for Brandon in Fall City on the day of the murder trial. Donna would sometimes read critiques of her work in academic books about trans people. But she didn’t accept these arguments, she couldn’t see what was wrong with her piece.
————————————————ACT 3: APOLOGY——————————————————
DONNA:
No I didn’t see, I didn’t see the truth in the criticism for quite a long time. And I felt unjustly attacked.
ISOKE:
And for Riki, in some ways, Donna was simply the product of her time, even if she were a lesbian, and part of the lesbian community.
RIKI:
I think that she also got caught in a shifting discourse on transgender inclusion and sensitivity to transgender rights and identity was still a relatively new idea. And she was just writing about it with a very old frame, where it was acceptable to your misgender and mispronoun trans people. Something that became totally unacceptable in a few years.
DONNA:
I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me. At some point in the early 2000s, I began to be concerned that maybe I’d gotten this wrong, [SCORE STARTS: dramatic piano] I think trans people were more visible, I started seeing and hearing a lot more about people. In 2005, I met a new girlfriend, who I eventually married, and my girlfriend had gone to graduate school in sociology, and knew a lot more about trans people than I did. And I remember I had begun to, I had begun to think that maybe, maybe there was a lot I just didn’t know about trans people. And that I had a lot to learn. And, and I started educating myself more.
[SCORE RISES: dramatic piano]
DONNA:
it was hard for me because, um, I had considered this one of my best articles. I mean I, I liked my reporting. And, um, I thought, I, I thought I was striking a blow against gender conformity.
ARNO:
This realization came with a fundamental questioning of her style and approach to writing. Donna’s writing has always been highly personal. It relied on interpreting the actions of others through the things she’d experienced, in her own life. Riki and others who had protested at the time had tried to point out the problems with her approach to stories. Problems you could read in lines like:
“From photos of the wonder-boychik playing pool, kissing babes, and lifting a straight male neighbor high up in the air to impress party goers at her and Gina’s engagement party, Brandon looks to be the handsomest butch item in history — not just good-looking, but arrogant, audacious, cocky — everything they, and I, look for in lovers”
RIKI:
I realized that was part of her style, to do this kind of high high, very intense personal engagement. And that I kind of accounted for, I think a little bit of why she took the unfortunate approach she did with Brandon. That being said, it’s not the approach that anyone should think about taking with someone who’s recently been murdered trans or not
DONNA:
I wrote a lot in my earlier career about the Christian right. Um, I was really frightened with them, and I went undercover and did many pieces on them. And my, my first book is partly about them. I, I read myself into them, or read them into me. I, I thought I can understand things about them by projecting through myself. And I mean, I think some of that may have been good, but I now, I’m much more suspicious of that. It’s hard, because I don’t believe that, you know, intuition should be divorced from journalism, but I, but I can plainly see that, you know, intuition and imagination, you know, it won’t give us, you know, all we need.
ISOKE:
Donna considered writing an apology but she was afraid she’d get something wrong again and face more backlash. But for the 25th anniversary of Brandon’s death, an editor at the Village Voice contacted her to write a piece. She thought it would be the best time to write an apology, and a correction.
DONNA:
I had begun to see that I had probably been wrong and I wanted to learn, and then I and then I wanted to apologize. It was hard to think exactly how to do that *laughs*
ISOKE:
In her apology, Donna points out the details she ignored that would’ve allowed readers to get to know who Brandon was and wanted to be. She apologizes for suggesting that Brandon being sexually abused as a child explained why he hated his female body. She wrote, “For years, I have wanted to apologize for what I now understand, with some shame, was the article’s implicit anti-trans framing. Without spelling it out, the article cast Brandon as a lesbian who hated “her” body because of prior experiences of childhood sexual abuse and rape.”
DONNA:
The reactions were not uniformly positive. Um, I did have, I did get some tweets that were like, you know, you know, “this is too late. Fuck you!” But I’m really pleased with the reaction overall. And I was, I was especially pleased that some trans people felt that I had really made it up to them.
RIKI:
I was glad to read, when she did make a public apology and I thought that reflected well on her. Public apologies are not easy to make. I’ve had to make a few myself in my lifetime and a few private ones. And it’s nice to know that she got it and gets it.
[The Bias theme song starts. It’s a mix of “the bias” “the bias” “the bias” quotes, kind of DJ style with some kind of electric guitar, beats, voice distortion.]
————————–ACT 4: REFLECTION BETWEEN ISOKE+ARNO———————–
ISOKE:
So Arno, what did you think of this story?
ARNO:
Yea, so the story was surprising in some ways. One of the things that came up is that when I think about murders of trans people, I usually think of Black and Latina trans women. This year alone, at least 40 trans people, most of them Black or Latina, were murdered in the US. It’s a number that keeps on rising. And that’s something that Riki also picked up. Because at the time, most trans people being murdered were living in urban, low-income, Black neighborhoods. Here’s what she said…
RIKI:
Brandon was the exact opposite. He was in a rural community, farm community, essentially, he was not urban. He was white. He was not Black or Latina. Brandon happened to be conventionally attractive in a way that, you know, white cisgender audiences could relate to. And that part is really sad, and in some ways, quite racist. But at the same time, it also opened the door to a new kind of awareness and coverage became the hinge for a lot of the later awareness. And we were able to build on around transgender violence because people knew about Brandon Teena they’d seen the movie, the movie did mad business.
ARNO:
So it’s a mixed bag right? And it’s not like reporters are perfect now, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing those workshops. People still get misgendered, called the wrong name, there’s still a lot of fantasies around trans peoples’ genitals and transition, and sexuality. And beyond the murder stories, there are many other facets of trans peoples’ lives that deserve to be covered, and covered well. So there’s a long road ahead.
ISOKE:
I think Donna’s story is particularly interesting because it grapples with a fundamental question in the craft of journalism: how much of ourselves do we as journalists include in the story? The obvious answer, for a story about someone you did not know personally, is none at all, but we’re human so in some ways that’s impossible. Yet, trying to understand someone through your own personal experiences or larger academic analysis is definitely not the way to go… Especially with a news story.
ARNO:
I feel differently. I think there’s value in trying to use your personal experience or an academic analysis to think through an event. But I think there are inappropriate ways of doing it, like in Donna’s original piece. Use of the personal and academic analysis can be useful to bounce back to a larger context or connect with other people. But in Donna’s piece, it was more about her than Brandon, at the cost of his dignity. And the reason she could do that, like Riki said, is that there wasn’t some kind of counter discourse at the time that demanded more respect for trans people. I think it’s definitely more of a thing now, even though it is not granted. The AP, NPR and other big news outlets are updating their style guides. Trans people and stories are making it to the cover of mainstream outlets. We’re at a point where journalists are increasingly being asked to recognize the humanity of trans people and cover them accurately. It’s a struggle, but there’s more space than there used to be to have better stories told about those communities, or at least, there’s more space to criticize.
ISOKE:
Yeah I hear that. We can agree to disagree on including the personal in news reporting but you and Riki are so right about the shifting discourse. There’s still so much work to do but recognizing where we’ve made mistakes in the past and being willing to apologize and do better next time is definitely a place to start.
Well, that was The Bias, the podcast where we talk what happens to a story before it prints out. I’m Isoke
ARNO:
and I’m Arno!
ISOKE:
See you next time!
ARNO CREDITS:
This podcast was produced and reported by Isoke Samuel and Arno Pedram. It was edited by Kalli Anderson. The footage of the protest, of Leslie Feinberg and of the karaoke is from Dyke TV. The music is remixed from audionautix dot com. The podcast theme is by Gus Fisher. Special thanks to Donna Minkowitz and Riki Wilchins for their contribution to this episode.
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